Evolution of an Airship

When I decided to make my first short film, Eleanor Xandler: Temporal Detective, I knew immediately I would have to film the entire thing on greenscreen. I wanted to have real locations, but that was just so difficult and complicated to achieve as they had to be so specific in their look, and there was at least one part of the story that had to be on greenscreen anyway, that it made sense to just shoot everything in one place and fill in the backgrounds later.

There are flaws with this approach. When it's been done before in the past it has had a spotty success, and this is from professionals who really know what they're doing. Films like Sky Captain, the Star Wars prequels, Lord of the Rings, and King Kong, all have at least some greenscreen in every single shot, and a few environments that are entirely digital from top to bottom - and yet, to me, it's somehow glaringly obvious. Something about the compositing, the lighting, the staging, the artificiality, I'm not sure what, gives it away, at least to me. Even Avatar was convincing only a few times.

This gives me hope. My compositing skills are not ever going to be at professional level quality, but as, apparently, that can be a bit dodgy at the best of times I am in good company.

The first artificial background I have begun creating is for the opening sequence. I figure chronological order is as good a place to start as any. This means a cloud-filled sky, and a Steampunk Airship called The Wandering Star.

My first image is crude and simplistic. That's because I quickly slapped this model together in less than an hour, as a guide to show the cast and crew what we were filming. It oriented them somewhat, and gave them something to imagine was surrounding them as they stood in an endless sea of green.

After filming was complete I began to model the final version, carefully going through it step by step to include as much detail as I could. My normal approach to 3D modelling is to be a bit slapdash, to save time, cutting corners where things won't be seen, trying to find short-cuts to achieve the look I'm after. But this time I couldn't afford to be so cheap with my attention, and tried to give the model all the detail it needed, even if it meant hours of just pushing points around in a mundanely dull fashion.

The above image is a good start, but notice on the image below that there is an adjustment between the two. The windows are bigger, the railing is thicker and closer spaced. That's because I realised the scale was wrong.

I imagined the Wandering Star as a two-person vessel, that being Eleanor and her robot pilot Gadzooks. Therefore space to move could be minimal. She's not going to be playing Shuffleboard on the Lido Deck, after all, but she might have a passenger. I adjusted the scaling to a more logical size, from 25m down to 16m long. This is not only more realistic a scale, it also means she doesn't get too tiny in the shot when the framing shows the full profile of the airship.

I then added in the water tanks. Being steampunk, there needs to be steam. That means a lot of coppery brassy tanks and pipes and whatnot, so I put in the engines that drive the propellers. I also bought a plugin for Lightwave, a handy automatic rope generator that allows me to concentrate on the placement of the rope in a simple string, and it automatically fills in the twisty detail. The ropes do make the model polygon-heavy, which causes a bit of a slowdown, but it's well worth it. They add a level of realism that brings it to life, especially when twisted around the block-and-tackle.

Texturing is a complicated procedure, something I've never been very good at. You have to adjust so many factors to get things looking right that it gets bogged down in maths and angles and trickery that I frankly struggle under the weight of. Colour, diffusion, specularity, reflectivity, occlusion, transparency...

The brass and deck textures are relatively straight forward. Brass wraps around everything evenly, so it just has to be a golden metallic colour applied on all things I have deemed should be brassy. The deck is flat, and can have the texture projected directly from above. But the rest of the objects all have UV maps.

UV maps are when you unwrap an object, especially one with an unusual shape, so that it lays flat within a square page. That way you can apply the texture as a 2D image and it will apply itself to each individual polygon consistently. If you then subsequently move, rotate, or scale the object the texture remains fixed where you want it. But unwrapping each object into its UV shape is fiddly work. The weird shape of the airship's hull means I have to wrap a wooden plank texture that follows the curvature logically, with no distortion or irregularity. Laboriously adjusting the UV point by point is the only way to achieve that.

As I continued to apply the textures one by one I adjusted the model to fit. I'd suddenly have an idea of what should be wood, what brass, to give it that industrial elegance that steampunk requires. The rudder, for example, I was looking at in its plain wooden state and just thought it looked boring. So I added a brass strip and some bolts. Then another. Then some hinged joints. And some cog gearwheels. Suddenly it looked like it actually operated in a mechanical way, something quite elaborate yet logical. I am now tempted to adjust some of the other parts of the ship to match...

This is the final model of the ship, from the angle it will be seen most often, and in profile as it will rarely be seen at all.

Someone pointed out to me that the placement of the balloon causes an apparent imbalance that would make the rear of the ship topple backwards. But hey, it's science fiction. Technically the balloon isn't big enough to lift the vessel at all. I moved the balloon that far forward to give a sense of speed and dynamism to the design of the ship, though most of the time you won't see the ship from that side and it won't look quite so awkward in motion. But if it makes you feel any better, imagine there's a heavy counterweight in the forward hold.

Surrounded by Artists

It's been three weeks at my new job, and I've gotten into the swing of things a bit better. After a small technical delay I got paid this week, and it's so nice to have real money in my bank account again. I splurged on a visit to Amazon.com, somewhere I haven't purchased from in a whole 18 months! Hurrah! I can catch up on my favourite authors again.

I thought I'd tell you all a little bit about where I work. I can't give too much away, because what we do is not for me to share, but I can say we create and animate digital characters for various different, usually online uses.

There are five other guys in the room where I am, all artists of different kinds. Ben is the main 2D artist. He designs concept art, textures for ZBrush, and other graphics.

Josh is another animator like me. He seems to have been there longest, and is quite talented indeed. I think I'll be learning a lot from him. He has a quiet charisma, like he's the cool kid in class.

Matt is currently working on a video game for mobile phones. He gets somewhat excitable. We work in generally a quiet environment, we're all concentrating so hard on our projects, and that seems to frustrate him a bit, so he finds any excuse to try and liven things up. He brought in a Nerf gun the other day.

John only comes in for a few days a week. He is the Website guy. He seems to do more than just that, but I have no idea what.

Paolo is from Italy, and has only been in Australia a couple of years. He's the video editor and compositor, but he's also an accomplished 2D artist, and does some of the work Ben doesn't have time to do. He has to know a little bit about 3D, to be able to apply the UV textures efficiently, so he's learning that too.

I am a bit of an all rounder. My first week I was animating, my second week I was modelling characters, and this week I did both of those things, plus I composited some sequences in After Effects. These are all my favourite things to do for fun, so it's not really like work at all!

Jayden is the supervisor. But he's also a talented artist, modeller, and rigger. I think he animates as well. He looks after all the projects, and makes sure we're on track and deliver on schedule.

But he's not the Manager. That's "J" who is based in Canberra. He is always out trying to get us work. Next week he'll be in Las Vegas.

So for the first time ever, I am surrounded by incredibly talented artists. They each have their strengths, most of which are at a level way higher than mine, partly because they've been in environments that encouraged their creativity and skills to develop, while I've been in something of a vacuum doing most of what I do at home, alone, with little guidance, insight, or feedback. It's an unusual feeling to be in amongst people who truly are in their element, and can guide me into improving because they know what they're doing.

Another new experience is that I am part of an assembly line. I just do my part, and don't have to deal with the frustrating things I'm not very good at. Somebody else does the conceptual design, then I do the modelling. I export the UVs (using a handy tool I knew nothing about but takes the frustration out of it), somebody else paints and applies the UV textures. Then somebody else does the complicated job of rigging, then I animate. Somebody else does the rendering, using high-end computers looked after by IT professionals, then I composite them - if there are extra elements involved (yesterday I had to blend in digital smoke, for example). It takes all of the frustration out of it, and frees me up to do what I do best and not stress about the other technical details.

Also, this is the first time I have been in a job where I've not been in at the ground level. Every other full time job I've had I've been able to grow and learn as the company did, making it very easy to pick things up, at a pace that suited me. Here I've hit the ground running, learning the way they do things immediately, and having to figure out some stuff that I've not done hardly at all. I've surprised myself by picking things up quickly, because really 80% of what I have to do I do already know quite well, so they've been very accommodating, and all in all I've acquitted myself pretty well.

It's been a fun few weeks, and I don't think I'll tire of it any time soon. I expect some parts will get tedious or complicated and frustrating, but until then I'll make the most of it and bask in the satisfaction of having a decent income again.

Animated and Articulated

When I left my last full time job, I was flush with cash and full of promise. I had planned to take a year off, maybe two, to learn a couple of new skills and take my career in a completely different direction. The skills I had planned to educate myself on, not through formal education but by nutting it out myself from books and tutorials and experimentation, were (jargon alert) 3D character modelling using subpatch, and character rigging and animation.

I had done a lot of hard surface modelling before, that is things like vehicles or buildings, but not so much with organic stuff, which required a different approach. Because things like humans and animals and caricatures have smooth rounded curves over most of their form, and need to "deform" in a specific and familiar way when their bits get moved around, it means using a method that avoids sharp creases and corners. That is called subdivision modelling, or subpatch.

It's wholly different to anything I had done in computer graphics (CG) before, so I anticipated it to be complicated and stressful. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. I found it remarkably easy to get to grips with, and I bashed out my very first model in a matter of days. It was a learning experience and a half, no doubt about that, as there were new things to learn at every step, but they were intuitive, and every time I got stuck I just doggedly worked at it until the answer became clear. It rapidly became my favourite part of CG modelling, and I work in subpatch almost exclusively now, if there are curves required anywhere.

Since then I've made many character models, and have enjoyed it every time, each one taking a shorter time as I got to grips with its fiddly nature, especially when I had a clear concept of what I was aiming for.

Rigging, on the other hand, is a bastard. When you animate a character, you need to make a skeletal arrangement inside that hinges at the joints, broadly in the same way a human skeleton does. Each of these "bones" need to have limits imposed so you can't bend them too far or in the wrong direction, and then controls are included so you can get at them to move them around. You also have to go through the model and specify which parts are affected by which bones, and by how much, so that there's a little bit of movement of the upper arm when the lower arm bends, for example. But that is a very complicated procedure.

Another example, in the real world feet don't go through the floor, but in CG they can. In order to make sure they don't, you have to add in a special limiter to stop feet from going a certain distance. Also, you have to keep limbs at a fixed length, but that means when you bend a leg or ankle they are now floating above the floor (try it. Stand on one foot and swing your leg forward and backward). So how do you make both feet touch the floor like they do in a walking cycle? You have to move the hips, forward and downward to bring the feet down with it, which means any animation of one leg automatically alters what needs to be done with the other, and aaaaarrgghh...

See how complex it is to explain? Imagine that times five, and that's how complex it is to rig. I struggled with it, and managed to do it okay once. Then a new version of Lightwave came out, changed the way rigs work, and all the old skeletons no longer do what they're supposed to. And I haven't a freaking clue how to fix that.

Animation is relatively easy, it's just moving the bits into the right place, and then after you've broadly placed everything where you need it, you re-time things by moving keyframes about, and then go into finer detail levels to adjust and tweak. But unfortunately, the biggest downside is the more complex the rig, and the busier the scene, the slower the computer works, and then it becomes prone to crashing. Very very frustrating.

Ideally what I wanted in a job was to not do the messy things like rigging, and instead be given a reliable and powerful computer to model characters and animate them, with a subtle guiding hand when I need it. Basically to just sit in my corner, get given a task I'm capable of, do it, hand it in, and then get another. Consecutively, rather than many projects all at once with different priorities and deadlines.

Two years passed and, just when I felt comfortable about my skill level and wanted to put myself out there, the Global Financial Crisis hit. Suddenly nobody was hiring, and in fact most people were firing. Just great. Two more years passed of unemployment, and my generous savings started to deplete into dangerously low levels.

Then eventually, as the Crisis eased and hiring started to happen again, the experienced people who had previously been fired were the ones being taken back, and beginners like me continued to be overlooked. Added to that, as a Lightwave user, I am not in demand.

The Industry Standard application is called Maya, a very complex and high end program that is very different and difficult to learn. There's also 3D Studio Max, which is used mostly for creating video game characters. A few others include Softimage, Houdini, Cinema4D, Blender, and a few specialised apps like Z-Brush (textures), RealFlow (water simulation), and Vue Infinite (terrain generation). Lightwave is not used very widely at all, and, even though it was one of the pioneers, it hasn't quite managed to keep up in the way it needs to, to be a contender. Jobs requiring it are as scarce as hen's teeth.

So with all that going on, I had little hope of there being a future in this Industry. And as time went on, I was resigned to having to fall back on a career I really didn't want to participate in anymore. I really wished I was good enough for doing 3D Graphics or Visual Effects, but also really felt I wasn't in the right place at the right time for it to ever happen.

I joined an email mailing list, which periodically sent through employment opportunities for VFX and Graphic Artists, but 90% of them were for companies based in Sydney, or elsewhere around the world (sometimes as far afield as South Africa or Japan), and were for skills and experience I just didn't have. One did come through that looked ideally promising. It read:

Requirements:
• Proven motion graphic production, video editing and compositing skills
• 3D modelling skills
• Excellent design sensibility and artistic skill
• Strong Portfolio
• Working with Adobe Creative Suite, Lightwave 3D, Zbrush and other software programs

Well, crikey, that was completely perfect! Look, they actually use Lightwave! So I applied.

That was in September 2010. Presumably they found a few people who suited the job because they never got back to me... until, that is, a couple of weeks ago when they unearthed my CV from their pile and emailed me. They are a small animation company who design and build characters as Avatars (representations of people to use online in chat rooms or on mobile phones, designed to be sort of like the mix-and-match type characters you use in video games). One of their team was going to be away for a while, perhaps permanently, and they needed someone to replace him. They asked me to come in for an interview, which was brief where it seemed to me that, based on my showreel and CV, they already knew I could do what they required. Hours later I was told I had the job if I wanted it. Wow! It all happened so fast!

It seems that, in the same way it's hard for me to find a job using Lightwave, it's also hard for them to find an employee who uses it! So when they find someone who does, they hold onto them as tightly as possible.

I started working there this past Monday, and it's been quite a whirlwind since. On the first afternoon I was asked to start animating, which I didn't expect to happen so soon. Luckily it was something relatively simple I could ease myself into. Though I've done a little bit of character animating, and what I have created is pretty decent, I'm effectively still just a beginner. But I knew the principles, and the controls, and a few of the tricks and gadgets, so it wasn't as challenging as it might've been. I spent the week animating four short clips, that I was allowed free reign to create myself, and there were only a few moments where a guiding hand was needed. I think I acquitted myself quite admirably. The boss certainly seemed pleased (making his own sound effects as the animation played back).

There are only two minor problems with the job that I've encountered so far. Firstly, the commute is long, expensive, and means I have to get up early. Ugh. And secondly I am in a room sharing with about six other guys, so I can't talk to myself, wander around wasting time, or play with my toys, like I do when I work on these things at home. So the new environment is something I'll have to get used to. I'm also the oldest one there, yet the least experienced, so it's a bit of a weird combination.

So, to sum up:

• I have almost the ideal job.
• I am learning new stuff that may lead to very cool opportunities.
• The people who work there are talented and pleasant and I should fit in okay.
• I am earning good money again.
• I am finally relieved of some of the stress I've been burdened with these past months.

If that isn't good news, I don't know what is.

The Future Has Opened Up

Something unexpectedly good just happened.

Details to come.

Bridge to the Stars

I was looking at an image of a fantastic new mega-camera that will be installed on the Blanco Telescope at Chile's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and was marvelling at the bright attractive colours. It wasn't that long ago that everything technological was white or silver or grey, and now they are deliberately building complex machinery in bright colours.

It occurred to me that the garish 60s colour scheme found in the original series of Star Trek's Enterprise now may not be so out of place as it was looking for so long. Yes, it's still very dated, but stylistically it wouldn't necessarily be as out there as we might have expected when we were living through the Space Shuttle-oriented functional style of Science Fiction of the 80s, and the beige casual style of the 90s. We're now widely adopting the iPod-style of the 2000s, which may subsequently evolve into a colourful candy-coated style of the 2010s. Certainly I see many cars are starting to move away from the whites, silvers, and bronzes of recent times, into bright greens, yellows, and reds, so I think it's inevitable that this will spill into other electronics.

But the Enterprise style still looks cardboard and studio-bound. It definitely needs a spruce up if it was to be realistically adapted into a style that would actually be utilised in a spacecraft. Big boxy desks and chunky platforms would not be likely, and would need some softening and practical adjustments to be useful.

So I was thinking about that idea, on how you might want to adapt the bridge into a more modern styling, while still maintaining the original series palate and sensibility. After looking around online to see if anyone else had done that first, and not finding anything, I decided to do it myself. I would make a 3D model of the original Enterprise bridge and then use that as a template to update all of it into something sleek and modern but still very familiar.

The first thing I changed was the control panels, moving them from chunky desks to flat iPad-style touchscreens. This lent itself well for all the displays, including the wallscreens around the circumference and the display monitors.

I added a second turbolift door, to balance the symmetry of the bridge's layout, though it could just as easily lead to a different room instead, such as a conference room or the Captain's ready-room.

Then I made the Captain's chair into something slimmer and more flexible, while still maintaining the same dimensions and location, overlooking the Conn.

The railings around the central pit could be thinned down to bars, instead of the ugly thick wood of the original set, and shifted around to give a clearway from the turbolift to the Captain's chair. I also added an extra display panel on the railings for access convenience.

In the end, I'm not sure how much of an improvement it is. It is just as likely to appear dated in fifteen years as the original bridge does, but it is, I think, more in keeping with the future of technology and is somewhat more logically arranged, if not strictly speaking as interesting to shoot (the clearway to the lift doors does make areas in the frame feel empty).

Overall, though, it's not bad for a first pass.

A Different Kind Of Remake

Sometimes I watch a movie from a long time ago (the 80s - sad to say that is almost the dark ages, in some respects) and wince at it. Not because it's a bad film, but because styles and technology have changed so much in the intervening years that it feels dated and creaky.

The most obvious difference, especially for me, are things like the visual effects, which back then were entirely practical or optical, which is to say they were literally filmed on top of the original film using another camera, or were drawn on by hand. Almost no computers were used at all for filmmaking back then (except for motion control cameras and some crude computer graphics).

But there's also audio quality, colour grading, title sequences, soundtrack orchestration, and the pacing of the editing. All of these have improved, or changed, quite significantly in the last decade or so, and have altered our expectation of how our entertainment plays out.

And it occurred to me how interesting it would be for someone to take the original footage of an entire shoot from a film made in the 80s, and completely re-cut it, from the ground up, into their own movie. They would have to be unfamiliar with the movie, so it shouldn't be a much-loved classic, but can't be a completely obscure lump of nothing, so I figure a typical 80s fantasy film that could do with a few tweaks to boost its quality would be ideal.

Krull was not a runaway success on its initial release in 1983, but as cheesy 80s fantasy movies go it did a lot of things right. Some of the casting was excellent, with rough-hewn Alun Armstrong, a pre-fame Liam Neeson, a very amusing David Battley, and a noble and wise Freddie Jones.

But it also did a lot of things wrong. Lysette Anthony was very pretty, but they dubbed over her voice so she had an American accent! Why? Almost none of the other cast were American, so why change her lovely voice? Plus her role was to be a damsel in distress, which in this day and age is unacceptable.

The lead was played by Ken Marshall, who has not done anything else of note, and it's no wonder as his acting is mediocre at best; He has some charisma and charm, but absolutely no energy and is certainly no hero; As a prospective King he would be a weak and ineffectual ruler.

The bad guy is a monstrous creature, known only as the Beast. He doesn't play much of a proactive role in the story. Yes, he kidnaps the princess and throws challenges at the band of heroes, but all from a distance.

And finally, the magic weapon, the glaive, is all style and no substance. It isn't used as a knife or sword, instead it is mystically operated to fly around and slice in a method not adequately explained or explored.

A few other factors are also worth mentioning. The score is suitably grandiose, with a couple of pieces being very cool, especially the piece accompanying the fire mares. The Beast's soldiers are really creepy, as they scream when they die. Rell the cyclops is very well done, and is a great character. The landscape is quite epic and beautiful, especially as much of it was not augmented by matte paintings, but were genuine Italian locations. And the adventure as a whole, where they travel across the kingdom picking up members of their band as they go, was well structured and had a lot of time for us to grow to love the characters.

So I think it would be marvellous to be able to go into the original takes and edit the film my way: Choose new shots, with new edits; Use the original voices of the cast; Replace all the visual effects, matte paintings, and model shots with CG and digital set extensions; Improve the makeup on the creatures and cyclops; Colour grade to bring out the vividness of the colours and match the interior sets and the exterior scenes. Re-record the soundtrack to match my new cut; and make it faster, funnier, and more exciting.

I figure with a small team of ten or so to achieve it, especially not having to actually organise and shoot the film itself, it would cost only a couple of million dollars and take 18 months to get it looking perfect, perhaps sooner.

Who do I talk to to get this happening?

I Don't Know Nothin'

Sometimes I wish I had a tutor looking over my shoulder, giving me tips and step-by-step lessons.

My current hobby, amongst many, is that of visual effects. That includes 3D Modelling, Texturing, and Animation, as well as Compositing, Rotoscoping, and anything else that comes up as needs must.

In the professional Visual Effects industry you can specialise in any one of those disciplines, but when you're an amateur just trying to put something cool together, you have to know a little bit of everything. I do know a little bit of everything, but only a little. It's not quite enough of any one of them to get professional work straight away, but it's plenty enough to continue as an amateur.

My skills lack mostly in understanding the tools I have at hand. Though I have many excellent books, and there are plenty of great websites to get some tips from, including Video CoPilot and SpinQuad, there's nothing quite as useful as turning to an experienced person when you're stuck and asking them just how to achieve the fiddly thing that's missing.

I have a good eye. I can look at a clip and see what it needs and have a reasonably good idea of how to achieve that, in principle. But in terms of actual execution, I am average at best, and struggle.

In the picture above, which is from a clip about ten seconds long, only the soldier is real. Everything else is digitally created or a manipulated still image photograph. I had to: key out the greenscreen, and then rotoscope around the soldier for his every move to give him a clean edge (and also the second soldier who has since been cropped out of the shot); build and texture the truck model, animate it coming down the road; build and texture the road and walls using a blend of several photographs; and then composite them all together using a series of layers, tracked to the original camera shake, and colour graded so that all the disparate elements fit together as a whole.

I have worked on this shot for over a year, from prepping and shooting the plate of the soldiers, modelling the truck, through to assembling the pieces, and then subtly adjusting it until it has reached its final stage. In that time I learned a lot about modelling a vehicle; about animating wheels; about rotoscoping in separate chunks instead of in one big go; about colour grading; about "expressions" which are mathematical ways to manipulate 2D layers; about "Depth Maps" which are greyscale images that represent the Z-Scale, or depth, of a 2D image or clip to give me virtual 3D to play with; and about "chromakey" which is a method of removing a single colour from an image, such as for a greenscreen.

If I had a tutor, guidance from an expert, I could have finished it much sooner, and with less struggle, and perhaps even more efficiently using techniques and tools I've not even touched before. I do wish I had the time and money to organise something like that. But I don't even know where to turn. I'm no beginner, so a regular Night School course isn't quite what I'm after, but there are no doubt many beginner's steps that I do need to brush up on before I can skip to the top level.

Until I figure myself out, I will enjoy being jack of all trades, master of none, and be thrilled by those artists who really know what they're doing, and who produce first class awe-inspiring work every time.

House of God

Since beginning modelling in 3D with any earnest, i.e. after I had gotten over the initial stumbling blocks of figuring out how the hell I can make all the myriad of options available to me in Lightwave actually do what I want, there have been a few things that have been near the top of my "want to try making" list.

I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to model very cool, and sometimes intricate, things for various projects, such as a steam locomotive, an old truck, a jet fighter plane, and an Imperial Shuttle. I have learned new modelling techniques, how to texture and light things to be as realistic as possible, and what most of the buttons in the menus actually do.

But there are a few things that I have yet to try my hand at, those that I plan to make, one day, when I have some time to spare. These include a steampunk airship, an accurate mediaeval castle, and a fully articulated robot.

But top of the list has always been to do a cathedral.

Cathedrals are arguably the most spectacularly beautiful examples of architecture in mankind's history, and personally are about the only thing I allow the Catholic Church to have gotten right. With huge towers, embellished with spires, and long vaulted halls supported by tall flying buttresses, and a multicoloured rosette window, they are works of art like no other.

There are thousands of cathedrals worldwide, of various designs, but they all have a standard layout they conform to. After all, if they didn't adhere to certain architectural consistencies they'd just be churches or chapels. But these are cathedrals, the grandest and most impressive of the faith-related buildings, and they have a job to do. Which mostly seems to be as tourist attractions.

One cathedral I was particularly impressed by is St Mary's in Sydney. I had a look around inside and out, and was in awe of its scale. Previously all the cathedrals I had visited had been comparatively small, though still with all the prerequisite features. The cathedral I have decided to base my CG model loosely on was randomly chosen from pics online, but turns out to be one based in Washington DC, called the National Cathedral. However, I am taking some liberties, and fudging the design when it's faster and easier to cut corners.

The interesting thing about assembling the model is how intricate and detailed it looks, but really it's very repetitious, with fancy delicate frilly bits and bold statement parts, all being repeated multiple times, sometimes hundreds of times, throughout the design. That means I need only model one spire, and then can copy and paste it 24 times to flesh out the tower details.

The bad things about this approach include that the repetition can sometimes look obvious; and that the high level of detail slows down the computer display, making adding each new level of detail slower and longer.

But in the end it will be worth it.

Anatomy 101

Whenever I model something in 3D that I've never done before, it's an education.

When I first modelled a building in any level of detail, I had to look at the structure of it as though it was real, and piece together all the elements in much the same way you would to build it in the real world. But without the heavy lifting.

So I was acutely aware of how walls meet the roof, and what makes up the details of window frames, or how the door latch works. And now whenever I look at a house, I have a new appreciation of how buildings look and what went into its design and construction.

The same for modelling a car. I learned a lot about how the steering works on front wheels, and how the suspension attaches to the chassis. Even the curve of the windshield is a complicated feature that you don't really appreciate until you see how neatly it has to fit into a very specifically curved slot, unique to each and every make of car.

I have found the same newly discovered fascination with big complicated things like aircraft, right down to small domestic items like computer keyboards, and organic stuff, like trees and birds, which have a whole other level of sophistication.

For the past few days, for a Pick Up And Go production, I have begun modelling a human skeleton, which will eventually be animated as a sword-wielding skeletal warrior and composited into the footage we shot a few weeks ago.

The human skeleton is something we're all very familiar with, but few of us will have had an opportunity to look at one closely. There are 206 bones in the human body, and I have to model each one of them (though some are fused together, and some, like ribs and fingers, are very repetitious) and then piece them into place, at the right scale and proportion to not only look exactly right, but also to be able to move in a way that looks cinematically appealing.

And it's amazing to me how cleverly the bones interact with each other, how the range of movement is so wide, but with limits that suit our needs so well. Admittedly, we push them right to the edge sometimes, and occasionally wish we had more flexibility, or the ability to adjust them, or had a couple of extra limbs (even wings), but what we do have is a miracle of evolutionary engineering, and it was fascinating to see that, as I am putting the skeleton together piece by piece.

So far I've been quite happy with how it's looking. I have been building most of the parts individually, from memory, then comparing it with an image of the real thing including the joint assembly, so I can adjust my model to match closer. However, I haven't yet compared it as a whole to an image of a complete skeleton; I expect I may have to slide the knees or elbows around a bit to get them right.

Though, of course, no two skeletons are the same. It's part of what makes we humans distinct from each other, and the differences go as deep as the bones themselves. Therefore, as long as I have all the bits approximately correct, that will likely be close enough to be acceptably believable.

Hard Day's Knight: Vincent and Wally

Progress.

These are the first steps for A Hard Day's Knight, the animated short film which may never be made.

I've jiggled Wally's textures a bit, and shortened his arms a tad. Then, not being able to stop myself, I grabbed the layers for his body and armour, and whacked them onto the head of the other character (which I had also previously modelled earlier this year), rearranged most of the points to make him skinny and tall, and so Wally and Vincent, the two stars of our little animation, are fully rounded and, almost, complete.

As a character, Vincent is a much tidier person than Wally, he takes a pride in his appearance that Wally chooses not to emulate. Also, he likes to think of himself as being more intelligent than his friend, but really he only barely qualifies as such. And, compared to Wally's comfortably rotund and squat appearance, Vincent's posture is quite lanky and awkward, so he's not as graceful as he would like to think.

I struggled a little bit with getting Vincent looking just right. The bulk of the chainmail armour and steel breastplate unfortunately hid his skinny physique. I had to work on it quite a while, but I eventually figured out how to make him look thin while still covering up his chest with bulky armour.

The trick was: lengthen his legs considerably; comically shorten his pant legs; and give him a short upper body. This allowed for the armour to remain tiny and narrow, emphasising his skinny chest, and giving it just the right balance to look in proportion, but still exaggerated.

This is a key factor to caricature. You can't just enlarge anything you want, and put them where you want. There has to be a balance, a perfect ratio, that works.

Jim Henson, mastermind behind the Muppets, knew of this trick, that there's a magic triangle of eye-position to nose-position that is always pleasing to look at. If the eyes are too high, or too far apart, or tilted the wrong angle, they just don't work so well. You'll see evidence of that when you look at some of his earliest Muppet characters, or in some puppets that aren't Muppets, where they haven't managed to achieve that golden ratio. But all of Henson's most successful Muppets had it, worked out during the design and building phase.

That same kind of ratio and proportional balance applies to other caricatures, like in cartoons and 3D characters, where whole body proportion, like limb length, body shape, forehead-to-chin, ear-to-nose, shoulder-to-waist, arm-to-leg, etc etc etc, needs to fit. If you can't get that balance just right, it will feel off-kilter, or wrong somehow. Unfortunately, it can be hard to pin down where exactly it is failing. It can take quite a lot of experimentation with adjustments before you start to recognise the subtle things, those that work, and those that don't.

I like to think that I am pretty good at it. Now if only Pixar would come knocking.

Hard Day's Knight: Wally

Quick post just to show off.

Did some character work, finishing off one I'd begun many months ago, for an animated short film that Rob and I are considering. It'd be a lot of work on my part, though, so we're not sure if it's a practical direction for us to head down.

Here's what I've done. I am particularly pleased with the hands and feet. They're the parts I often struggle with, but this time I nailed them. I think it's my best work so far, and the way I've textured and lit the model makes him look particularly realistic.

Click on the pic for a bigger view.

There's a second character to model, but I'll probably just grab the body of Wally here, and attach it to Vincent's head and then move some points around to re-proportion it. Much faster than completely modelling everything again.

The Opel Blitz

I was supposed to be doing some other kind of work this weekend, I promised someone I'd finish something up for them.

But though I did do a little bit on it, I instead got carried away with something else that I wasn't even supposed to do for weeks yet.

And why have I blogged this admission to slack off proper promised work, and instead to bugger about unnecessarily? Because this is the fastest CG model I've ever built. In only two days, technically around 8 or 10 hours work, off an on, I made this model of a German WWII Truck, the Opel Blitz.

I've always been fast, mostly because I cut corners. People are often surprised that I can come up with something to show them in only a few hours from when we spoke of it.

Though then when I promise to finish something, I start, then rapidly tail off, and then very slackly never get things finished. Unless I am paid to, and there's a specified timeframe.

Anyway, back to the CG model I made:


It's still incomplete, and has no textures yet, but the broad details are all there. I am really happy with it so far. It's arguably the best model I've ever done, especially as vehicles can be so fiddly.

This one will be going on my showreel, that's for sure.



EDIT:

A couple of days have passed, and I've applied textures. I think it's all done now, except for a driver, but I've rigged the wheels to steer, and now all I need to do is the actual final animation and composite that it was built for.



ANOTHER EDIT:

Here's a lighting test, in the actual location (matte painting) that the truck will be driving down in the finished shot.

Checkpoint: Operation Big Ba Da Boom

This weekend was supposed to be when I was shooting my first short film. But it was not to be, I cancelled the shoot when it all fell apart before my very eyes. As I have mentioned before, I have few regrets, and it is possible I'll revisit it later in the year.

But as the camera and dolly tracks were already booked, Rob thought he might take advantage of the opportunity of a weekend where a team were available to assist. We had gotten a review of the edit of Checkpoint so far, and there was one suggestion that it was a shame there wasn't a single cutaway shot of one of the other British Soldiers. At the time of the original shoot, no other British soldier was in the cast, so it wouldn't have happened even if we'd deemed it necessary. But it is glaring in its absence, in the current cut.

Well, a single shot isn't enough for a big hassle - we probably could've done that with a simpler camera and a quick dash outside with a mate in a tin hat. But Rob and I detected another feeling of absence in the film, which is the whole back-story of the mission our main Brit character was on.

Originally we were going to gloss over it entirely, and then meet the Soldier properly later in the film where he describes that it all went wrong. The problem is, we didn't really show what their mission even was - it was implied, but only in a single shot that gave away very little. We as creators knew it all, but an audience coming in cold would not be satisfied by this. It needed just a few additional details to fill in the blanks.

So we sat down and went over a few things that we both wanted to see. I wanted them to run amongst the trains. Rob wanted them to attack a couple of German soldiers. We also wanted to build up the similarities between the British soldier, Finn, and the Germans at the Checkpoint, Kleine and Weiss.

We have recently learned a lot about what we were capable of with greenscreen keying and motion tracking, and my 3D rendering is getting to be quite realistic. We set ourselves a few really fun challenges with these shots, including following the soldiers along as they dash between the trains, soldiers marching up to the C-47 plane and climbing in, a brief burst of gunfire as the Germans discover them, and an overhead shot of Finn sneaking up behind and disposing of a Guard.

Every one of the shots we did, and there were at least 30 of them, will have some kind of greenscreen keying and background elements added. Many of the backgrounds will be digital mattes, pieced together from photographs, and many will be 3D graphics, especially the shots with the planes and trains in them.

We have basically put another six months of work on our plates. Though I have made the train and plane already, they don't stand up to extremely close scrutiny, so some parts of the trains will need to be rebuilt in higher resolution. And there are new things to make, such as a suitable period car and a German army truck that drives up a road.

Wow, it's not going to be easy!

But then, that's what makes it fun to do.

Panda-Monium

How's that for an original title. Oh well.

Dreamworks Animation has, in my estimation, a bit of a chequered history when it comes to originality. Its very first production was 2D, based on the Biblical story of the Exodus of the Jews, better known as the Ten Commandments, and was called Prince of Egypt.

It was pretty good, but a bit dour and dramatic. Not really a movie for kids, though I'm sure they got something out of it. It's one of those Bible myths that probably has a fair amount of truth to it, somewhere amongst the miracles and epic absurdity. If you ignore the talking to God, burning bushes, and parting of the Red Sea, the story comes down to two brothers who diverge in their beliefs and have a bit of an argy-bargy over ruling their people.

Anyhoo, they soon realised that kind of movie wasn't going to bring in the moolah, so they immediately took a leaf out of Disney's book, and headed down a family friendly comedic route.

The Road To El Dorado which was based on the Bob Hope & Bing Crosby "Road To..." movies, was clearly stolen from what Disney had planned originally for Emperor's New Groove (which had started out as the more dramatically themed Kingdom of the Sun).

Sinbad, which wasn't as good as it ought to have been, was very similar in style to Disney's Treasure Planet.

As Pixar started to make a real impact, Dreamworks shifted its focus to CGI animation, believing that those movies make more money than traditional 2D animation. A load of baseless nonsense, of course. Pixar's success is based entirely on great characters in fun stories with hilarious humour. All things that do not impact the style of art used to create them.

But as the CEO of Dreamworks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, used to work for Disney, he had some insight into what was being developed by Pixar. And though he denies it, he clearly was stealing their concepts and then trying to rush them through to release first. I have always resented that about Dreamworks.

Equivalent movies include:
Antz = A Bug's Life
Shrek = Monsters Inc
Shark Tale = Finding Nemo
Madagascar = Into The Wild

Now, plot-wise they aren't really similar (except for that last one) but if you were to hear on the grapevine that Pixar's next film was going to be about fish, or about monsters, then you can definitely believe Katzenberg would then say "Hey, lets do a movie about monsters". Even worse, they have a new movie out in the new year called Monsters vs Aliens and the character design is so similar to Monsters Inc it's highly suspicious. Though it does look like a funny film.

I watched Dreamworks's new feature last night, Kung Fu Panda. It stars Jack Black as a panda who unexpectedly is chosen as being the greatest warrior of legend and prophecy despite being an incompetent clumsy boob. It is an excellent movie. Really funny, brilliantly animated, and highly recommended.

And best of all, as far as all the plagiarising of ideas that I have just accused Dreamworks of partaking in, this is a wholly original concept, that I can only praise them for.

And this is the thing - when they forego the pop culture references, and choose a story that is not based on another company's production, Dreamworks do amazing stuff, the top of their game. Though the sequel is inevitable, I hope they continue to make original product, one-offs like Over The Hedge (admittedly based on an existing comic strip) and Bee Movie, and don't run ideas (like Shrek) into the ground. They deserve better, and deserve to be seen.